This picture, which the sitter recorded in her memoirs as 'the best thing he [The Hon. Henry Graves] ever did....quite a little gem' (Leaves from the Notebooks of Lady Dorothy Nevill, op.cit.), was painted in 1855 and exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year. It is a revealing portrait of one of the most fascinating of early Victorian collectors. The sitter is set firmly in the 18th Century where her passions as a collector lay. She is shown 'in her boudoir, rather in the style of paintings by F.H. Drouais or La Tour' (S. Houfe, op.cit.) dressed in the kind of 18th Century gown which she had begun to collect by the middle of the century. The objects surrounding her, a Sèvres tea service, a rococo ormolu-mounted bracket clock, an elaborately painted leather screen and the silver gilt dressing table service in a style early Victorians imagined to be 18th Century, represent her taste.